My hair started to turn grey when I was about 21 – a hereditary trait which I have never had a problem with – but when I was made redundant a few years ago, Louis Killen's singing of The Banks Of The Dee took on a special significance: "For I can't get employment, me hair has turned grey." So what if I had worked for a high street bank rather than a coal mine? – it was a great song and a superb performance.
A short while ago, I came across a request in rec.music.celtic for details of the Killen recording. The writer had been told by the man himself – who had emigrated to the United States in the late Sixties – that it was only available on vinyl.
I hastily dug out my Iron Muse CD on Topic and posted off the details. A grateful reply quickly followed, including Killen's e-mail address and the suggestion I contact him, which I did. I had heard Killen sing in an incredible ballads session with Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson at the Peter Bellamy memorial day in London, October 1992, so I told him, asked him when he was likely to be over here again and asked for guidance on a couple of words in the third verse of TBOTD, which I hadn't been able to work out for myself. He obligingly replied, and promised to let me know next year's UK tour dates once they are fixed, so I can spread the word beforehand.
This little anecdote will hopefully serve to show that the newsgroups are easily the most rewarding, useful and enjoyable area of the Internet to explore. The folk newsgroups in particular are perhaps a little bit Sixties – in a caring, sharing sort of way – though the free exchange of information is central to Netizenship in general. But of course the vultures are rarely far away with their junk-mail messages urging you to "Read this and get rich quick!" You just have to ignore them. You might even be able to get your software to ignore them for you.
The easiest way to explain a newsgroup to the off-line community is to liken it to a public noticeboard where people leave information or requests for information for others to read and make use of or answer. The main difference is that each noticeboard in cyberspace has a particular theme.
There are three main sources for folk-related information – rec.music.celtic, rec.music.folk and uk.music.folk. Once you have subscribed – don't panic, no money changes hands, this is merely Internet-speak for clicking on a particular button and becoming a regular visitor – to a newsgroup, your software will present you with the titles of the most recently-posted messages, so you can choose which you want to read in full. Articles are presented in threads, which keep articles on the same subject together. An article might attract no follow-ups, or two or three, but recent threads which have generated considerable interest include the closure of the Digital Tradition, a Web site which I recommended in the July issue of FoT, the threat by ASCAP to charge girl scouts for singing God Bless America at summer camp and, on a smaller scale, councils in Hastings and Ashford outlawing pub sessions by not allowing more than two musicians to play at a time unless a pub has an entertainments licence. Some good news by the way is that the Digital Tradition has founda new home.
Of course there are several hardy perennials such as 'Is folk music necessarily acoustic?' and 'What is folk?' is always guaranteed to attract a healthy response. At the time of writing, a request by Rod Stradling for subscribers' thoughts on 'traditional music' had attracted nearly 120 posts. Some of these replies went off on wild tangents, some down blind alleyways of petty bickering between correspondents, but some have provided considerable food for thought.
The sort of information you can find from the newsgroups is as diverse as the following: a list of all the pubs in the Kingston/Richmond area that hold sessions; information about the Widow's Uniform, a touring production based on Peter Bellamy's Kipling settings; tour info for Tom Lewis and various concert and CD reviews. Of course you must exercise caution when reading this information – the same sort of caution you should exercise when reading a newspaper, because the author doesn't always know what he is talking about. Recent posts asking who wrote Another Train had several replies – not all of them Pete Morton – but the cock-ups were quickly corrected by Artisan's Jacey Bedford, who spends almost as much time on-line as Dick Gaughan. How do these people find time to record?
A very serious recommendation to anyone wishing to make use of the newsgroups is an off-line newsreader. For a long time I would happily spend up to an hour browsing through the titles, reading articles, replying if I found something I could contribute to. The phone bills were pretty excessive. A piece of software such as Agent – which you can try out for nothing in its shareware version Free Agent – allows me to download all the new headers from some 20 newsgroups since I was last on-line in a minute or two. I then hang up and choose which articles I want to download. This takes another couple of minutes. I then spend my hour reading the articles and composing replies, which take another minute or so to upload. So I've reduced my phone bill to a tenth of what it was and I don't tie up the telephone – to the rest of the household's delight. Click here for more information about Agent or here for a list of download sites.
There is a system of rules and regulations involved – the infamous 'Netiquette' – but I'm inclined to suggest to the inquisitive that the first step is to subscribe, read as much material as you have time for and above all use your common sense.
So if you want to find out the words to Reynardine, a message with the title 'Help' is less likely to produce the required result than one asking 'Does anyone know words to Reynardine?' and if you want to find out whatever became of George Michael – uk.music.folk is not the place to ask!